Research shows that the average person has 41 apps on their smartphone but only opens up less than eight of them a day.

The Wall Street Journal recently estimated the app market to be worth $25 billion annually worldwide but despite that boom creating an app is not a licence to print money.

At the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco last month, Apple announced that the number of apps in the App Store had reached 900,000.

But research by app monitoring firm Adven shows that about 580,000 of those apps are "zombie" apps, which means they never make any most used lists and were downloaded between once and 100 times a day.

For some apps, being downloaded once a day might be an overly optimistic estimate.

Application monitoring service New Relic recently released figures claiming more than 60 per cent of the apps in the Apple app store have never been downloaded _ not even once.

And while there are some apps most of us feel we can't live without, there are many more that are simply cluttering up our phones and tablets.

The New Relic figures show that of the apps downloaded from the Apple and Google app stores, one in four is abandoned after the initial use.

New Relic also reveals just what we do with our phones in the 150 times a day, on average, we check them.

For 43 per cent of the 6.5 minutes on average we spend on smartphones we are playing games. Social networking then takes up 26 per cent of the time ahead of entertainment with 10 per cent while productivity taking up just 2 per cent and health and fitness 1 per cent.

In April, app analytics company Flurry released a five-year report on the app world which showed the number of apps launched per day by consumers had risen from 7.2 in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 7.9 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2012.

While eight apps a day is not many compared to the 900,000 in the Apple app store, Flurry says there is a lot of variety in the eight apps everyone prefers.

Nearly two thirds of the apps people used on their smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2012 were not available a year earlier, meaning people's loyalty to their favourite apps is fleeting.

Here is our pick for the 10 apps you could use every day.

Tell us what daily apps you think we should use.

1.Flipboard: From the day it launched, it was a game changer for the iPad. This app, which makes reading your favourite web sites more like flicking through a magazine, is now available for iPhone, iPad and Android.

2. Google Maps: Google Maps has just been updated this week. While Apple Maps has come a long way from its troubled beginnings, Google Maps is still the map app that most people will turn to when they're needing to go from A to B.

3. News: Everyone has their favourite news service. You might prefer to check the mobile site for your local newspaper. My tip is to go to News.com.au and save it as a bookmark to your smartphone's opening page. News is then always at your finger tips.

4. Weather: You wake up, you reach for your smartphone and check the weather to decide whether it's worth getting out of bed. There's huge competition in the weather app market but Pocket Weather Australia is hard to beat.

5. MyFitnessPal: Sure, not everyone wants to log their daily exercise or count their calories but give it a try. This great little app lets you scan your food using the barcode and will help you keep in shape by looking at how much food you consume and energy you burn.

6. Banking: It's impossible to name one banking app. But whatever bank you use, download their app. It will simplify your life.

7. Beanhunter: Need coffee, now. Whether you just want a change from your local haunt or need to find a cafe in a new area this app will guide you to your nearest caffeine fix.

8. Facebook: There are many people who would list this as their number one app. To them we say, go forth and like your friends, a lot.

9. iView: The television industry is still coming to terms with the "second screen", whether that be the tablet we use to interact with our social networks while watching TV or this - a way of watching the shows you want to watch when you want to watch them on the device of your choice. In Tour de France season, we reckon you need SBS On Demand too.

10.FoxtelGo: Before you complain, we appreciate that if you don't have a Foxtel account, then this is not on your daily list. But if you do have a Foxtel account, having this on your smartphone, table, or now even on your PC or Mac will revolutionise how and when you watch your favourite TV shows.

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